No man is greater than his prayer life. The preacher who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying. The pulpit can be the shop window to display one’s talents; the prayer closet allows for no showing off. Poverty-stricken as the Church is today in many things, she is most […]
“Success” is the key to “successors.” Success isn’t what we leave behind; it’s what we pass on. The life of faith is a relay race. None of us can accomplish in our short lives all that God wants done. One of our greatest obstacles is the smooth transfer of the baton. Even our Lord, who […]
“Direct my steps by Your word, and let no iniquity have dominion over me” (Ps 119:133). No starker contrast could be drawn. The Hebrew word translated “iniquity” means “to exert oneself in vain.” When one does this, says the psalmist, the emptiness of it all suffocates the soul. Imagine that! As the Lord said through […]
William Williams, in his fascinating account of pioneer work in Venezuela, called It Can Be Done, tells how it was done, how a handful of missionaries, in a country one sixth the size of the U.S., carried the gospel to every city, town, and village in one generation. Facing strong opposition from the priests, long […]
“If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal 3:29). When I was a boy, Sgt. Preston of the Mounted Police, with his Husky, Yukon King, was the hero of a popular TV series. Quaker Oats sponsored the program. As a promotion, the company purchased 19 acres of […]
What are the most positive and most negative sentences in the NT? The first reads, “God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that you, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every (lit. all) good work” (2 Cor 9:8). In the Greek, the root word for “all” occurs five […]
We don’t always see the end game in the tragedies of life. “Why?” often hangs there unanswered. But faith discovers the answer here and there–enough to trust God for the rest. […]
“Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You” (Jn 17:1). We know from our daily lives that there are two distinct ideas about time: the passage of time and a point in time. The Greeks had the same idea. Chronos gave its name to chronological time, and kairos […]
I was standing with some Christians in a small antiquities shop hard by the ancient pool of Siloam. The clerk, a Muslim, had been spoken to about the Lord Jesus, and in defense had launched into his own “personal testimony” of his conversion to Islam, a borrowed rendition from previous Christians who had witnessed to […]